Fine Tuning: How Zendesk uses Zendesk, Part 2

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This is the second part of two-part Fine Tuning that highlights how Zendesk uses Zendesk to manage customer interactions across multiple departments.
Part 1
focused on how hundreds of Zendesk agents in our Support, Marketing, and Finance groups coexist in one Zendesk.

In Part 2, Lindsey focused on how some Zendesk internal departments use Zendesk. Departments included Facilities, HR, IT, Finance, and Training. For each department Lindsey shared:

Overview of the department and agent roles

How they communicate with other groups

Favorite Zendesk features

How using Zendesk has benefited been their group

Tip for a best practice for setting up a related workflow.

Zendesk Customer Success Manager Lindsey has been working in the tech industry for three years and brings experience from her previous SaaS company as a Customer Success Manager. For this discussion, Lindsey shared tips for going live going live and successfully launching your Zendesk.

Part 1: How Facilities & HR use Zendesk

Overview:

Our HR & Facilities teams share the same Zendesk because there is so much overlap between them. For example, HR often gets tickets from managers about desks and seating arrangements, which should go to Facilities instead of HR.

Facilities is the department that keeps day-to-day life running smoothly for Zendesk employees. They are a service-oriented department committed to meeting the needs of Zendesk employees, management, executives, candidates, and visitors. They greet visitors, maintain security badges, stock the kitchens, coordinate events, provide ergonomic assessments, and manage desk placements...among other things!

Facilities: Facilities Managers, Reception, Event Coordinator

Our Human Resources Department has the experts in employee services! Whether it's working to onboard employees, coordinating performance reviews, or just ensuring that everyone gets their stock documents, they’re on it! They handle the overall development, implementation and coordination of our HR policies and programs within Zendesk.

Why they use Zendesk:

Great for review purposes: easy to look back at similar tickets & see trends.

HR:

Less email! And it prevents employees from emailing one person when there is a whole group of people who can respond.

Ability to keep track of metrics, such as how many requests come in from employees each month (can’t calculate through email). Also good for measuring certain SLA’s, including turn-around time, response time, and for understanding whether we need to hire an additional employee to help with the queue.

Ticket workflow and common requests:

Facilities:

Tickets come in all day (anywhere from “I need to report a maintenance issue” to “I would like to request decaf coffee”).

Facilities Manager reads the ticket, tags it with appropriate subject (ie: needs a file cabinet), sets priority and type, and then assigns to appropriate person.

HR:

Tickets are sent to to the HR and or People Operations email aliases (which are routed to the same queue).

Everyone in HR is set up as an agent and the queue management responsibility rotates to a different agent monthly. Then, the responsible agent escalates each ticket manually to a person or group.

Because HR information is often sensitive, the HR Admin sets up restricted access with their Zendesk so only certain people can access the information (ie: information regarding personal benefits or compensation).

Communicating with other groups:

Facilities also communicates with IT because they often receive requests should the have been sent to IT. For example, someone might send a ticket to IT because they need a new monitor, but really that request should go to Facilities.

Ticket access is restricted by groups for HR, Facilities, IT. (ie: so facilities cannot see information about personal benefits).

Favorite Zendesk features:

Facilities:

“Business Card” trigger: when a ticket has “business card” in the subject, a trigger automatically re-assigns the ticket to the Receptionist (who is in charge of ordering the cards).

Macros: there are a lot of commonly questions that go to Facilities each day. They range anywhere from “what to do if you want to host happy hour” to “instructions for requesting a standing desk.” Having automatic responses for these FAQ’s are a big time saver!

Recipe:

When Facilities got permission to buy 50 standing desks, they sent out a mass email to all Zendesk employees asking anyone who wanted a standing desk to submit a ticket with the subject “standing desk.” All requests submitted with this title automatically got assigned a tag, which activated a trigger that sent instructions on next steps to receive a desk.

Macros: Because there are so many commonly asked questions, it’s helpful to have macros regarding commuter reimbursement , 401 k rollover, etc. Such a time saver!

Tags: Tags by location. Because we have offices all around the world, benefits information is different geographically.

How it’s benefited their groups:

Helpful for triaging - you can assign a task to another team mate without have to reword the request, worry about it getting lost in email, or correctly relaying the request verbally.

Help Center is a one-stop shop for all new employee related requests. It’s the first place all employees go with HR questions.

Pro tip:

For fast growing companies like Zendesk, seating arrangements are constantly readjusted. In the Facilities Help Center, maps of the office are updated every Monday. So, if you want to find someone, you’ll always have a place to find them!

Part 2: How IT uses Zendesk

Overview:

IT is the awesome team that focuses on internal solutions for Zendesk employees and our customer facing teams. They also help secure the Zendesk platform by working closely with our Security & People Operations to make sure we’re safe from hacksystem and by ensuring that employees are properly following compliance.

“Internal” (IT only). More secure information provisioning on internal tools, what to do if these tools go down, instructions on provisioning a phone to employee, etc.

Communicating with other groups:

IT touches all parts of Zendesk and collaborates with several other groups. Through ticket sharing, they work seamlessly with Finance Ops, Sales Ops, Security, HR, Facilities, and Legal.

Favorite Zendesk features:

Macro: Whether it’s commonly asked questions on internal audits, right password policy, or what the right screen saver setting is, macros are a big time saver.

Tags: IT often needs to pull audits. By setting up tags per request, these tags allow them to easily pull information for auditors.

Ticket sharing! They can easily share tickets with different locations, departments, and people….and they don’t even have to use the phone!

Part 3: How Deal Desk uses Zendesk

Overview:

During the Sales Cycle, Sales Reps might need to deviate from Zendesk's standard terms and pricing. Enter Deal Desk. In situations involving non-standard terms, deals are submitted to the Deal Desk through the approval process.

The purpose of each approval is to ensure they identify all non-standard matters and document approvals before agreeing to terms with a customer. Deal Desk is a central repository for approvals that enables easy reference and provides an opportunity to gather better metrics about where Zendesk as an organization can improve or alter pricing, product, or terms.

Ticket workflow and requests:

Typical workflow: ticket is assigned to an Executive, if Executive cannot approve, then it is assigned to VP. Once approved, the ticket is routed to Finance Ops for pricing confirmation. Once discount is approved by Finance Ops, the ticket is sent to Legal for final review.

Communicating with other groups:

Able to route ticketing back and forth between groups

Finance: pricing related requests

Legal: legal requests, approvals, etc.

Professional services: extended implementation assistance approvals

Favorite Zendesk features:

Light Agents: Sales Managers and Directors are light agents. They are CC'd on tickets for their reps so they have visibility and can make comments, but they do not own the ticket.

Views are key!

Different countries means different deal structures. To easily manage the sales teams in the Americas, EMEA, & APAC, there are separate views for each.

How it’s benefited the group:

Biggest benefit is being able to report on non-standard deals. What is the most common type of discounting request, should we re-do our pricing, etc.?

Since setting up the Deal Desk instance, in one month they have received over 57 tickets - and they’ve been easily tracked!

Recipe for best setting up your Deal Desk:

Set up one group of sales managers called Deal desk

Sales reps send ticket with subject "Deal desk"

Trigger automatically assigns ticket to group Deal Desk

Sales manager approves via email and closes the ticket

OR sales manager cannot approve, so uses macro to assign to SVP

SVP approves via email using #approve

Trigger automatically closes the tickets with #approve

Tip:

When creating a trigger to automatically approve something on behalf of an approver via email, choose something other than “Approved” as the trigger word such as “#approved”. This will ensure that tickets that should not have been approved do not get approved.

For example: If someone wrote in an email, "This ticket is not approved because we have approved 5 other requests from you this week." This ticket would have been checked as approved since the word was used. However, if you use #approved, this ticket would not have been approved.

Part 4: How Training uses Zendesk

Overview:

One of the most important aspects of Zendesk adoption is admin and agent training. Our Training team is in charge of educating our customers on both the admin and agent-facing features of Zendesk. They are the product experts who make sure our customers have the best understanding of Zendesk!

Why you use it:

Less email, less email, less email.

Zendesk helps centralize everything the Training team needs to address. Because they have their own instance, and share tickets into the main instance of Zendesk, it’s guaranteed that training questions are going to their team versus going to the main Support queue - which cuts down on ticket reassignment!

To provide a knowledge base that is specific to training related issues and questions.

Ticket workflow and requests:

Customer submits questions through the Feedback Tab in the Training Help Center and the ticket is sent to the Training queue. Most common requests include questions such as: How do I log-in? and why can’t I use my Zendesk log in to access my training?

The Training Help Center knowledge base contains articles about courses offered, how to purchase courses, and so on. Customers can read the articles first to find answers to their own questions.

Communicating with other groups:

The Sales team often sends tickets to Training to request training credits for courses that customers have acquired through the Sales team.

During the launch guidance process, Customer Success Managers will create a ticket on behalf of the customer for the Training Coordinator to register the customer for Best Practices Webinars and Zendesk University Courses. The CSM will set the customer as the requester and CC themselves for visibility.

Favorite Zendesk features:

The Help Center knowledge base because it is the easiest and fastest way for customers to find answers to their training related questions.

Ticket sharing so that the Training team can manage their support queue in the main instance of Zendesk.

How it’s benefited your group:

Average reply time has increased because training tickets are going directly to the training team.

Customers can use the Training knowledge base instead of the general forums on the Zendesk.com, which contains lots of content unrelated to training.

11 Comentários

Although it seems obvious, I assume HR/Facilties use a separate instancw of Zendesk from that discussed in part 1. Is this completely separate or more of a spoke?
Just trying to think through the logistics as I can see where adding non customer facing teams could be useful.

This is my favorite question! First, we examine global metrics for the week. Our goals require us to answer three fundamental questions:

Are we solving as many tickets or more than were created in the same time frame?

How fast did we reply to our customers while we were delivering those solutions?

Ultimately, were our customers happy with the support experience?

To start, we like to identify the total number of tickets created and the total number of tickets solved worldwide. This gives us a great overview of how we performed according to the demand.

Then we look at our Median First Reply Time. Median is important as it mitigates against any exceptional experiences from throwing off a more representative majority. We compare this number to Median Customer Wait Time. This allows us to track both sister-metrics in a related fashion. They serve to corroborate each other or highlight a gap beyond the first reply.

Following that, we identify our Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) rating for the same period. We could support all the volume in the world but it would not matter at all if our customers weren't satisfied. Right?

Here is a sample of how that would look in a single snapshot:

This let's us know how our global programming is impacting the customer experience at large. Once we have this contextual performance data for the whole group, we then break down the same metrics into regional teams to see how they each contributed. Finally, we review each individual on the team to celebrate their hero moments (positive CSAT rating with comments), highlight opportunities to improve (negative CSAT, slow reply time, low number of solved tickets), check in for feedback and all other standard review practices that a weekly data point furnishes.

Of course, once you have standard metrics defined for your goal tracking, you can then use custom reports for areas of focus or to solve trending team performance issues. Let's say agents are holding on to tickets for too long and not escalating them efficiently. If you build a report that shows the number of solved tickets, average resolution time, and number of tickets escalated for each team member week over week, it will facilitate the conversations with those individuals who need to keep pace with the rest of the pack. The point is that once these larger reports highlight an issue, creating a more custom report to track how your team responds to that issue is the key compliment that leads to superior support.

Hopefully this gives you a good glimpse into how we use performance metrics here at Zendesk.

Wow, I wasn't expecting such a detailed response - that's awesome. Thanks for the insight, it helps build something more suited for what your design intentions are.

I do run into one issue that the response doesn't really address. In our environment, its a little more fast paced than your average environment might be. Thus, sometimes a customer cant wait until the next day for a response and another agent has to pick up the ticket.

To create an extreme example: What would Zendesk do if an agent was rude and angered a customer, and another agent did the good deed and helped out by taking the ticket. The 2nd agent gets penalized.

Whats a good way to handle ticket sharing or escalations?

If the last example wasnt good: What if a tier 1 agent holds a ticket for 2 weeks, then escalates it to tier 2. The tier 2 agent would have their resolution time hurt by the tier 1 agent right?

I know exactly where you are coming from with this question! Let me take a step back.

The Zendesk ticket assignment strategy was built to promote accountability. This design has some ramifications on customer experience and agent experience. With regard to the customer experience, a single agent assigned to the ticket responsible for delivering a satisfying encounter is our primary use case. In fact, more than 75% of all tickets that come into our help desk are solved by the first agent who takes the ticket in Tier 1.

The examples you cited absolutely happen to every support team. I think we can agree that these multi-agent scenarios, while universal to support teams, are still the minority of a healthy operation. If you disagree, we can certainly discuss it. It's important after all to check in on our processes in these terms. It's strange but sometimes those processes that may serve our support goals\reporting needs might not be the best customer experience. For us, it's a red flag if our operation requires more than one advocate to solve the majority of tickets. So having a help desk that caters to the majority and then complimenting that posture with workflows or reporting considerations for minority processes seems like the approach with the most advantage.

That said, we still have the question of data integrity when tickets must change hands (which they certainly do!). To go with your example, if the first agent underperforms and leaves the customer dissatisfied, then the second agent inherits this satisfaction rating as well as a prolonged resolution time. Isn't this a penalty?

In my mind, the answer is no. On my team, I have hired that Tier 2 advocate exactly for their ability to convert a negative encounter into a positive one (at both the soft skill level and the technical level). I'll admit that it's a weighted ticket. However, all tickets that come into Tier 2 are similarly weighted with regard to resolution time, by definition. One could argue that a Tier 1 agent could hold onto a ticket for an extreme period of time (2 weeks is too long for Tier 1 here at Zendesk). But then, that's so exceptional it wouldn't mitigate the averaging power of weekly performance statistics of the Tier 2 agent who picked up the ball and found a way to score despite the setup. Also, there are business processes outside of Zendesk as well as business rules within Zendesk that should serve as a failsafe to prevent that extreme time consumption in Tier 1:

For example, you could have an agent in Tier 2 add a tag "inherited_csat" on tickets that arrive with a negative rating. Or you could add a tag "check_tier1" which would flag the ticket for review of the Tier 1 agent performance for improvement (such as holding on to a ticket for too long, going down the wrong technical path, etc).

*Note: *Examining tickets with either of these tags can be a great source for trending problems and developing individual performance and organization wide workflow solutions. We use both. :)

Finally, it may be a best practice to create an automation that alerts the Tier 1 manager anytime a ticket sits in a less-than-solved state there for more than is prudent (in your example, two weeks). I agree that the situation is unfortunate for the Tier 2 agent in that extreme scenario. And if they are feeling that pressure, imagine what the customer is feeling! I prefer a proactive approach that catches those Tier 1 exceptional tickets before they linger that long. Automations help us do that, well...automatically, so we don't have to go hunting to maintain an operation absent these exceptions.

In fact, I know some Zendesk customers operate at such a fast pace that if a ticket stays in a less than solved state for 24 hours, it will be unassigned and sent back to the queue with high priority. This might be an efficient method for achieving speed of resolution but I would just remind anyone reading that agent accountability and the single-agent experience wherever possible is the method that yields the most customer satisfaction for our model.

If resolution time for multi-agent tickets is a primary metric for your team (or you just need to know the numbers in a vacuum to define what amount of time makes them successful), then Insights is a perfect window into that data (Plus & Enterprise Plans). Take a look at the Agent Activity Report:

Agent activity focuses on performance metrics for an individual agent, including median time assigned to an agent and the agent's backlog trends over time.

Some support teams live and die by handle time data and if Insights doesn't get you where you need to be then it's probably wise to investigate a Time Tracking app. These apps are designed to give you better productivity reporting iteratively and may be the required functionality for you to define success for those other tiers and teams. And I totally get that approach too. Use the right tool for the job.

Brent, this has been fun and engaging for me. I want to make sure this thread doesn't detract from the substance of the Spotlight. But I want to assure you we are working on presenting more content on How Zendesk Uses Zendesk as well as further Best Practice Spotlights that target exactly this subject matter.

If you would like to talk more in the mean time, say the word and I'll set up a call with you.

We have a single Zendesk instance. We use this for both our support and tech services departments. What factors do you consider when determining to create a new instance? Can we use a single sign on for all instances?

That's a great question, and we hope this two part series shed some light on how to make that decision! The biggest factor to consider is likely security- is there sensitive information in the account that no other department should see? If so, you may require a separate instance to ensure data is kept confidential.

If not, and you'd like both your Support and Tech Services departments to use the same Single Sign-on authentication script, you could place them into separate groups to share an account and configure SSO only once. Different departments can certainly coexist in a single Zendesk account with views, macros, and business rules set up to be global or restricted to a group or an individual. Read about our shared support instance here: https://support.zendesk.com/entries/63210768

Hope that helps, but of course, let us know if you have any other questions!